The choice of a mate.

  • Anthony Ludovici
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details
    44/546 (page 14)
    more matrimonial failures than freedom of choice, there is a difference between— (1) Withholding freedom of choice in a standardized human environment. (2) Withholding it in an unstandardized human environment. (3) And withholding it in a human environment such as exists in this country to-day, which is not only highly differentiated and presents strange and aberrant types almost to infinity, but also hardly offers any standard of normality whatsoever, and in which the chooser, in addition to lacking sound primary instincts (reflexes naturally-conditioned) for mating, and subjected to no education in sound prejudice (reflexes artificially-conditioned), is moreover confronted by possible mates in whom ill-health is also a differentiating factor, is himself or herself presumably unsound in some respect, and moreover probably suffers, together with those round about, from a minus of genetic power. 1 (1) In the first, the mutual attraction necessary to happy and fruitful mating may be relied upon to arise, if not spontaneously by mere confrontation, at least in due course, when attraction has warmed to sympathy and devotion ; because a racial, psycho physical and aesthetic affinity exists between the parties before they meet. (2) In the second, mutual attraction follows confrontation, provided the consent of the parties is an essential condition of parental choice. Then, as with the Jews, the Romans, the Japanese and the English of the Middle Ages, though differ entiation may be so far-reaching that little biological affinity exists between the parties, health and genetic power may be assumed to be good enough to release in each party that lust of attachment which, as we have seen, is not over critical, and tends to explain the mutual attraction, as the result of a number of qualities which really play but a minor part. The importance of consent in such an environment of highly differentiated human individuals lies in the fact that only the parties concerned can tell whether the individual chosen by the parent is an object on which he or she can unload the pent-up force within. (3) In the third, the situation is more complicated. Not only is consent an essential prerequisite, but, owing to (a) the intricate and baffling confusion of shapes, sizes, types and features, 1 There is much evidence of a decline of genetic power, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries. This will appear in the sequel. The most original writer on this subject is Corrado Gini (P., p. 42).